BANGALORE: In a big boost to the country's startup ecosystem, multinational conglomerates such as GE India and Cisco have indicated that they may acquire young Indian ventures with innovative technologies in the near future.

Last week, GE Healthcare announced that it will open its John F Welch Technology Center in Bangalore for startups with ideas for frugal innovation in the maternity and infant healthcare space, where the number of deaths in India have been high.

"Once the products are developed, we will talk to the developers on possible co-licensing or even possible acquisitions of these startups," said Vikram Damodaran, director of healthcare innovation at GE Healthcare India.

India is a natural test bed for companies like GE Healthcare India, where both medical needs and startups are in abundance.

"While technological help will be provided by a team of experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, under its specialised wing CAMTech India, intellectual capital will be offered by GE," said Elizabeth Bailey, director at CAMTech, Massachusetts General Hosptial, who will be organising a hackathon later this month to screen the right ideas.

In a similar initiative, Cisco Investments announced that it would set aside $40 million (Rs 240.9 crore) to invest in early-stage Indian startups and would consider acquiring them.

"It is important to embed these innovations. It brings tremendous amount of shareholder value," said Joydeep Bose, managing director for corporate development-investments and acquisitions at Cisco.

The company's fund will invest in three verticals-connected mobility, big data and internet of things. "This is new. For companies to look at India seriously, the ecosystem needed to reach a certain scale. It looks like that is happening now," said Ramesh Loganathan, vice president of Progress Software and adjunct faculty at International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad.

As part of the $250 million (Rs 1,503 crore) global fund, Cisco has invested in two Indian companies - Mumbai-based Covacsis, a realtime analytics platform for industries, and Bangalore-based Mob-Stac, a mobile app developer.

Besides this, it has invested in digital media start-up Qyuki in 2012. Although Cisco declined to share if the agreements with Mobstac and Covacsis included a right of first refusal clause, it said it would keep an option open.

These initiatives will provide a perfect leg-up to the 1,000-odd startups that come up every year, according to data compiled by Think-Next, a Microsoft-Ispirt partnership. Others MNCs like IBM are still looking at startups as an intermediary between the company and clients.

"We use startups as a vehicle to give innovative offerings to end clients," said Karthik Padmanabhan, country head of ecosystem development at IBM India. The company has clusters in Silicon Valley, India, and Tel Aviv in Israel, where its products are heavily used by startups. And for companies like Microsoft, platform adoption and entry to newer markets is the main motive for its interest in working with startups.

"Board level meetings at large companies are now focused on how not to get disrupted. All tenured companies, at a certain point of time forget how to learn and hence experiment in different ways with startups," said Mukund Mohan, director of Microsoft Ventures.

For Intel Capital, which has invested in ecommerce players like Snapdeal and Health-Kart, this gives it greater technology penetration in the country. "India has always been a captive development centre for many multinationals . But they are seeing the growth of the startup ecosystem in India. Many of them believe that the startup ecosystem will mature in India and want to be part of this process," said Pradeep Tagare, director of Intel Capital India.